Category: Research

Last month, I had the great pleasure of participating in the Scottish Storytelling Festival, speaking at an event called ‘City of Stories; City of Dreams‘ alongside storyteller James Spence and Sian Bevan, the Programme Manager for the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust. The storyelling and discussion were followed by a walking tour down the Royal Mile and Canongate, led by poet Ken Cockburn.

As the title suggests, Edinburgh is a city with a rich literary history. It’s difficult to walk through Edinburgh’s centre without passing by the home of a great author or philosopher, or stumbling on a place that has been imagined and re-imagined across countless books, across many centuries. One of my favourite aspects of this event was its location – it was held in the recently refurbished Riddle’s Court, a 16th century building once home to enlightenment thinker David Hume and later the site of Patrick Geddes’s university summer schools.

Ceiling in the Geddes Room at Riddle’s Court, Edinburgh

Many of Edinburgh’s stories are so familiar and iconic that, no matter how old or new, they shape our experience of the city, both as residents and visitors. Stories like Walter Scott’s Waverley, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Body Snatchers’, Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and Alexander McCall Smith’s New Town novels, beginning with 44 Scotland Street, come together in our imaginations to build an Edinburgh full of contradictions, intrigue, adventure, and beautiful majesty alongside social and architectural decay. But these are complemented by many less well-known stories, like Margaret Oliphant’s The Laird of Norlaw, and many that seem to be entirely forgotten by the contemporary imagination, like Sarah Tytler’s Lady Jean’s Son, from which I read during the Storytelling Festival event. This novel has been long out of print, and is one of many Edinburgh works my colleagues and I on LitLong: Edinburgh found through the computerised text-mining of several large databases of digitised literature in English.

The opening chapter of Lady Jean’s Son, published in 1897 but set during the Douglas Cause trial of the 1760s, describes Edinburgh’s Old Town in ways that evoke the bustle and class diversity of the 18th century city, while still carrying a kernel of the Edinburgh we now know. As the novel begins,

The Canongate of Edinburgh was lying in the full sunshine of a summer morning, which brought out in bold relief its high lights and deep shadows, its stateliness and its squalor. In its promiscuous and often incongrous life and movement, there figured freely lords and ladies; douce burghers and their thrifty spouses; learned lawyers and divines; caddies and fishwives; members of the City Guard, in their cocked hats – coats, waistcoats, and breeches of a “muddy-coloured red,” with their gruesome Lochaber axes; incorrigible vagrants and still more incorrigible randies – now a stray Englishman bewildered and scandalized, now a wild Highlander equally amazed and disgusted, but from an entirely different point of view. [1]

1897 edition of Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, in the University of Edinburgh’s special collections

While both books create a similar vision of the city, each author comes at the sites of the Canongate from a different point of a view, and the more of these descriptions we take together, the more layered our imagined city becomes, like a Palimpsest, inscribed and re-inscribed across the centuries.

Ford and Aldington

As you’ll have seen in my previous post, there are a couple of authors with whom I’ve become particularly associated. Richard Aldington knew Ford Madox Ford well through the London modernist networks of the early years of the twentieth century. I find Ford a fascinating author. He loved storytelling, even at the expense of fact, which makes all the more impressive the achievement of Max Saunders in unpicking Ford’s life in his exhaustive, magisterial two-volume biography.

My favourite anecdote brings together the two authors I’ve mentioned; Aldington tells the story in his entertaining and engaging memoir Life for Life’s Sake (1941). Aldington was dining with his father and invited Ford, who proceeded to regale Aldington senior with stories of his childhood among the Pre-Raphaelites (Ford’s grandfather was indeed the painter Ford Madox Brown, and much of this was true). However, the mood of the dinner took a turn for the worse when Ford started to talk about how he met Byron, who had died almost fifty years before he was born…

Ford on TV

You might, perhaps have come across Ford in recent years if you’re a Benedict Cumberbatch fan – the big, shiny BBC/HBO miniseries (2013) of Ford’s great war novel tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-8) was striking and successful, scripted by the eminent playwright Tom Stoppard. (You can watch it via Box of Broadcasts.) Stoppard did a good job of adapting 840 pages of four novels into under five hours of prime time TV, although necessarily some liberties were taken. For example, Ford’s ending looks forward after the Armistice to an uncertain but hopeful future, while Stoppard ends, perhaps too neatly, with the fevered celebrations of Armistice night.

Parade’s End

It was, of course, my interest in the First World War that brought me to Ford and Parade’s End; I’ve a chapter on Ford and War in An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford, and he features in my book, too. The series tells us the intersecting stories of the protagonist Christopher Tietjens, his wife Sylvia Tietjens, his inamorata Valentine Wannop, and his brother Mark Tietjens. The characters represent the push and pull in the years between circa 1912 and 1920 between insistent mechanisation and modernisation, and older moral and ethical values that are coming to seem outdated. Christopher Tietjens insists on doing what he believes the morally right thing, even despite the potential damage to his own reputation and other practical considerations.

The Parade’s End novels use a form somewhat akin to stream of consciousness, although there are multiple consciousnesses represented. The narrative moves associatively between different protagonists and moments in time; these chronological changes are highlighted clearly in the recent Carcanet critical edition, which makes following the shifts easier than in the longstanding Penguin editions.

Parade’s End is quite difficult as an introduction to Ford. His other very famous novel is The Good Soldier (1915), but for some alternative choices, why not start with his social commentary about England and the English (1905-7) (vol. 1 and vol. 2 available for free online), or his fascinating psychological novel A Call (1910)?

In the course of an academic career, you tend to become associated with particular ideas, topics and authors. This can often happen in part by chance – being in the right place at the right time. As many of you will know, my main research interest is in the First World War. It’s what I wrote my PhD on, and my monograph, along with all sorts of other publications.

In this and a subsequent post, I want to point you to a couple of authors who might not be familiar to you, but who I’m interested in, have worked on quite a bit, and am involved with author societies or other means of promoting their legacy.

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington has become a figure I’ve returned to throughout my academic career, since writing about him for my MA thesis (now longer ago than I would prefer to think about). He’s probably still best known as one of the original Imagist poets, along with H.D. (who was for a time his wife) and Ezra Pound; much of his poetry is available online for free at archive.org. I was particularly drawn, though, to his First World War novel Death of a Hero (1929). Angry, bitter, and sharply critical of the British literary and political establishments, Death of a Hero is a satire so brutal that it is often misunderstood. Aldington’s position, though, was that the brutality of the war should be matched by the form of writing about it. For him, to write in a polite and measured way about the conflict was fundamentally to misunderstand and misrepresent the experience of it. I’ve recently written an overview of his war poetry Images of War (1919) and Death of a Hero for a forthcoming Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War.

Death of a Hero was so confrontational and shocking that it was originally expurgated – Aldington worked with his editor at Chatto & Windus to remove sections that were thought likely to be unacceptable to a contemporary readership. The removed words, sentences and sections are indicated in the text by asterisks as Aldington wanted the reader to know where emendations were made. Sadly, the recent Penguin republished the expurgated text, which I thought a missed opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of Aldington’s prose; I’d recommend looking out for the unexpurgated version, which you’ll find in most 1960s paperbacks (published by Four Square and Sphere) and the 1980s Hogarth Press edition.

For information about Richard Aldington, you can look at the New Canterbury Literary Society Newsletter. Originally founded as a paper newsletter by the late Aldington scholar Norman T. Gates, I’ve recently “rebooted” it as a blog.

Please do let me know if you read any Aldington and want to talk about it some more!

In July I had the privilege of attending the International Gothic Association’s biennial conference at Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), in Cholula, Mexico, a place complete with its own be-tunneled Aztec pyramid and live volcano Popocatépetl which liked to greet us in the mornings with puffs of steam. I have been a member of this Association for ten years and this was my fifth conference. It’s always a pleasure to see old friends and familiar faces as well as getting to know the many fascinating new people I inevitably meet at events like this.

Mexico was a particularly exciting place to hold the IGA conference and many people at home asked me why I was going to such a sunny country for a Gothic gathering. Fortunately, it’s not an essential requirement to wear black, and personally I wasn’t aware of anyone actually crumbling to dust in the sunshine.

Gothic piñatas

Bringing the IGA conference to Mexico was a long-standing ambition of organiser Dr Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, and continued the Association’s recent efforts (2015 was in Vancouver) to tug the conference out of its European nest and help to make it truly international. The conference theme was ‘Traditions and Departures’, signalling the ways that European Gothic traditions do travel, but do not always colonise: they often meet other cultural traditions coming the other way, or may themselves become profoundly transformed. As IGA president Dr Catherine Spooner reminded us at the opening ceremony, the Gothic likes to challenge boundaries and we are a scholarly community more interested in building bridges than walls.

To give a flavour of how distinctive the Gothic in Mexico can be, conference day two ended with a screening of new short film, Los misterios de las monjas vampiras (The mysteries of the vampire nuns) directed by Antonio Álvarez Morán, who attended dressed as a vampire. Shot locally, the film begins with Aztec sacrifice, ends in wrestling, and in between is a panoply of Mexican Gothic excess, and is killingly funny (see the trailer on YouTube). In the Q&A afterwards, the lead actress was asked if she’d found anything challenging about playing her role, and won all our hearts when she replied that she had not, because ‘inside every woman is a little bit of nun and a little bit of vampire.’

It wasn’t all like that, though, and the conference programme proves that we did also get down to some serious analytical work on everything from werewolves to whales, linen to Lolita, and Scotland to steampunk.

Professor Isabella van Elferen delivers her keynote presentation

It is exceedingly difficult to make a conference presentation look exciting. While looking at this photograph of Professor Isabella van Elferen’s keynote on Gothic music, you will need to imagine that she is, in fact, playing this track VERY LOUDLY throughout the auditorium and asking us to pinpoint what, exactly, makes it Gothic. Can you?

LitLong: Edinburgh is a database of literature set in Edinburgh and the complementary suite of visualisation tools that emerged from the ‘Palimpsest: Literary Edinburgh’ project, which I’ve worked on since 2014. The project was funded by the AHRC’s Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities – Big Data scheme, and was a collaborative effort between a team of literature and informatics scholars. The ‘LitLong: Edinburgh’ site and tools launched in 2015, and included an interactive map through which to explore literary imaginings of various locations around the city, dedicated maps highlighting Edinburgh in the works of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, a mobile application to guide users through the city’s literature in situ, and a database search interface.

Edinburgh has a well known literary history, which is visible to us every day through books, maps, monuments, walking tours, and the many sites that commemorate the lives of the city’s famous authors. Our research team wanted to expand our understanding of this history by digging into the digital literary archives, exploring how representations of the city have helped shape our imaginative view of Edinburgh, and how both well known and lesser known authors have themselves imagined Edinburgh over time. You can read a little bit about the workflow and development processes from the project in this open-access article.

With the support of AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement, under the Creative Economy scheme, I’ve spent the past several months working with my team to further develop the LitLong map, database, and mobile app functionality. We’re excited to be relaunching a vastly improved interface, underpinned by an expanded database that now includes important works from Canongate and Birlinn Books, and more contemporary writing. The relaunch of LitLong will take place next week at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We’ll be in the new George Street venue, in Greenhouse #2, for The Story of Edinburgh, a full afternoon free drop-in featuring flash poetry readings, storytelling performances, and literary tours led by two historic Edinburgh authors (played by Artemis Scotland). Visitors will also be able to play with the LitLong map on a giant touchscreen, and we’ll be on hand to help visitors download the mobile app and start creating their own personalised literary tours of the city. The Story of Edinburgh will resume again on the 19th of August, and my colleague James Loxley and I will be chairing two ticketed book festival events, with local authors: one on reading the New Town (August 12th) and another on reading the Old Town (August 19th). Follow us on Twitter for regular updates, and keep an eye on litlong.org for LitLong 2.0!

I am currently enjoying six months of research leave, with an additional affiliation at the University of Edinburgh as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). At IASH, I am primarily conducting research on Stobsiade, a German-language magazine produced by German prisoners of war at Stobs camp near Hawick in the Scottish Borders, during the First World War. This research also serves as a bridge between my long-standing interest in the history and representation of imprisonment and a new project on German-British relations and emerging ideas of “Europe” from the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) to the First World War.

Having grown up in Germany’s smallest federal state, the Saarland, on the border between France and Germany – a region with a unique status, variously under the control of French and German administrations – I am particularly invested in thinking about the history of intra-European relations and the idea of a united “Europe” in response to a series of brutal wars.

My Freiburg paper focused on how some British commentators reacted to the official government policy of British neutrality in the Franco-Prussian War; for instance, the Christian Socialist John Malcolm Ludlow complained about his government’s “selfish cruelty” (“Europe and the War,” Contemporary Review 15 [November 1870], 653) and emphasized the country’s responsibilities in and for Europe, asking: “How could England be weakened by the support of Europe? Is the fable of the bundle of sticks [with the moral: there is strength in union] really a mystery of a nature so recondite as to be utterly beyond the comprehension of an English Foreign Minister, of an English Cabinet?” (“The Reconstitution of England,” Contemporary Review 16 [March 1871], 502). The country’s policy was also derided in Henry William Pullen’s popular didactic pamphlet The Fight at Dame Europa’s School (1871), illustrated by Thomas Nast.

As Britain finds itself at another crossroads in its relationship to the rest of continental Europe, with public opinion deeply divided regarding the nature of this relationship, there is perhaps no better moment to revisit the country’s history of self-perception concerning its role in Europe.

This has been a particularly busy year for me, as Emily Alder and I ramped up our activities with The Age of Frankenstein during May 2017 with a full programme of screenings and talks. In June, I gave papers at two very different conferences. The first was Adaptation and Nation, held at Queen Margaret University. This was a wonderful, small conference put together by my former colleague Michael Stewart and it was great to be able to meet up people I hadn’t seen in a while. I gave a paper entitled ‘Why We Do Not Adapt Jean Rhys’, an author who has been close to my heart ever since I read Wide Sargasso Sea as an undergraduate. This piece will be included in an edited collection that will be coming out of the conference, which included participants from Europe, the UK, and South America. The conference also afforded the opportunity to see this remarkable short film, which also screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival: 1745 (Directed by Gordon Napier, Written by and Starring Morayo Akandé) See more about the film on their indiegogo page here

My second conference was the spectacular NECS (Network for European Cinema Studies) in Paris, where I gave a paper on echoes of Frankenstein in Black Mirror and Penny Dreadful. This paper was part of a larger piece of research that feeds into a journal article I’ve been working on. With over 600 delegates, NECS was one of the largest conferences I’ve ever attended, and with scholars from all over the world it was wonderful to hear so many different languages being spoken during the breaks and at the reception, held in the stunning old Sorbonne.

Finally, my last conference of the summer was a panel on Feminist Pedagogies, Feminist Classrooms with my colleagues Tara Thomson and Laura Joyce, at the first English: Shared Futures conference held in Newcastle. This panel grew out of the many conversations the three of us had had over the last couple of years about what informed our own classroom practices. We were able to make an audio recording of this session, and hope to be able to make it available online in the near future. As a result of this panel and the audience’s enthusiasm, Tara, Laura and myself will be taking forward our plans to create an online tool for discussing and gathering together intersectional, feminist resources.